Category Archives: Age Six

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I think as homeschooling families, one of our main goals is always the connection of the family and how we stay attached to each other in a society that sometimes doesn’t seem to value that at all. Some of the homeschooling families who read my blog, many of them, are also what has been termed and made popular in the common literature by Dr. Sears as “attachment parents.”

But what I want to talk about today is the development of the independence of the child within the context of attachment. I don’t think attachment and becoming more of an individual, more independent and more capable are mutually exclusive at all – we can still be attached but have separate psychological identities. In fact, I would argue, in order to become an adult that has a meaningful role within their own family and and as a citizen of the world, this has to happen. We have all heard the jokes or seen instances of people whose adult lives were totally enmeshed with their parents. It is funny for a television show, but not so funny in real life. Enmeshment prohibits a child and an adult from reaching the fullness and freedom of who they are.

I think healthy attachment starts not only with connection, lots of connection and including but not being limited to extended breastfeeding and co-sleeping, but with loving authority and boundaries. I think if you have read this blog for any length of time I have made that abundantly clear. I think I have also talked a fair bit about boundaries. Boundaries, in its essence, is not just how “strict or loose” your parenting style is; it is about how you GUIDE your child to HEALTH as a growing, developing SEPARATE individual. It is also about creating balance, and creating opportunity for right growth, especially for those children where self-growth and self-development are not initiated.

Separation, to me, starts around the child is age three and says “I” for the first time. That is the beginning, the spark of recognition that “I am myself.” I may not know or understand all that means yet, but I am me. Bernard Lievegoed, author of “Phases of Childhood,” marks this as a stage of self-awareness. This can also be a phase of negativity from the child; by pushing against the outside world the child begins to develop the self.

It continues with the six/seven year old change. Some parents write me and say, “My child went through the six/seven year old change. They slammed doors, said they hated me, said that I was not the boss of them. Then they were done.”

Okay, but let me put this out to you: the six/seven year old change, to me, is not just about “you’re not the boss of me.” It is about finding a psychological identity that is separate from parents – that they have a role in the family or at school, they know what that treasured and valued role is, and that they do feel accepted and loved but also a bit “separate”, a bit ready to take a view on something…there is a shift toward the child having real opinions about the world, that may be different than the parent’s view, and that in this view that the child has a continuous self and therefore can participate in learning. At this stage, children in the six/seven year change usually also are interested in having friends, being a friend, in having community outside of their family. I think many times this is neglected and not mentioned in Waldorf Educational literature, because the assumption is the child is at the school in community. I think this is an important point for homeschooling families when looking at the development of their child. To me, turning outward toward community and peers and not just within the family, is a hallmark of the six/seven change.

This process can take up to a year and a half, I think especially for sensitive children who haven’t had a lot of opportunity to be around other children, or just children who develop a little bit slower. They may not be as interested in peers until the nine –year change, but then I have personally observed that that change may be a much more difficult one than the six/seven year change.

I think one way we can gauge where are children are in the six/seven change is to look at their play(see the many, many back posts on play on this site about how play changes during the six/seven year old change), and to look at their drawings of human beings, a house and a tree. Here is an interesting, brief look at drawings made by two thousand German five and six year olds prior to school entrance, comparing drawings made by those who did and didn’t watch media, those who did and did inhale passive cigarette smoke, and those with psychological disturbances: http://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/articles/RB13_2rittelmeyer.pdf There are whole books on working with children’s drawings in Waldorf Education; you can check Rudolf Steiner College Bookstore or Bob and Nancy’s Bookshop for those titles.

For the nine/ten year old going through this change feels utterly and sometimes desperately alone, apart from humanity, out of the Garden of secure family. They have an experience of self and it is a tragedy; there is no shelter of the family or of being with friends. Therefore, I believe firmly that children who do not have a strong sense of community and belonging built up through early childhood through family, extended family and strong friendships can have an even more fragile nine year change. Boundaries and loving authority can also make this change better, along with loving connection. The child is becoming an individual.

From the viewpoint of Waldorf Education, three things are traditionally seen as helping a child become an individual: childhood diseases, what author Edmond Schoorel in his book “The First Seven Years: Physiology of Childhood” calls “naughtiness” (which made me chuckle!), curiosity, and we develop memory. One that Schoorel mentions briefly, and that Bernard Lievegoed discusses further is that of the force of antipathy. “Very often there is the tendency to concentrate only on positive feelings. This is impossible. It destroys the drama, the basic law of feeling. Any attempt to present only positive feeling results in superficial sentiment. Feelings are brought forth from contrast and the nature of their polarity…It is not a matter of guarding children from negative feelings or denying them as such, it is a matter of presenting the feelings as opposites in the correct way.” (Lievegoed, page 170).

I don’t want to go into too much detail here, but I do want to leave you with a few teasing comments by Edmond Schoorel:

“Children do not need to understand everything; it is even better when they don’t..It is essential for children to have the opportunity to ask questions; yet they do not need answers on the level of their understanding. Mysteries are interesting because we do not have an answer.” (page 260)

“When children have too little curiosity, we face the question: can we stimulate curiosity? I think that we can do this only in an indirect way. When weakness has to do with the child’s constitution, we may have to work with movement development.” (page 248)

“Naughtiness can be a first exercise in waking up. With naughtiness, the child turns away from the order of which he or she was a part. It is a first step toward freedom and individuality.” (page 246)

And this process of connection to others, and connection to ourselves, continues as we grow and change throughout our lives. And sometimes we realize, yes, our circumstances and such may have been specific to us, but the tumult of different ages was by no means unique but being part of the human race.

Friends, I have been hearing from a lot of you recently via email and many of you are struggling with boundaries in your lives. I am not a counselor, and I am not a psychologist, but I wanted to tell you a few things I have learned about boundaries along the way in the experience of my life and I hope it will be helpful to you. I encourage you if you are having challenges with this to go and talk to a qualified counselor. This can be so helpful in getting your life, your family and your parenting going the way you want it to! What a wonderful way to start the New Year!

Boundaries, to me, are a skill that many of us have to learn. Perhaps our ability to set boundaries was damaged in childhood or early adulthood. Perhaps we are not even sure what a boundary is or why we would want boundaries. Or perhaps we have too many boundaries and have erected relentless walls in order to keep the world out.

Yet, healthy boundaries are so necessary. A boundary is something we set in order to separate ourselves from other people; it tells us how far a person can go with us and how far we can go with another person. It keeps us from becoming enmeshed with another person: enmeshment is a complete state of feeling so empathetically with that person that we take on the other person’s feelings, responsibilities,challenges and problems completely and wholly as our own. As parents, we are separate from our children; we are different people. And, boundaries not only separate us from our children, but it also shows how we are linked together in familial roles. We are linked together, but we are not the same. We are the adult. The relationship is not an equal one. We have more experience and more guidance, more logic and reasoning to bring to any situation. We also have a duty to honor the developmental stage of our child and we can do this with boundaries.

Relationships without boundaries cause dependency and stunted emotional growth for both ourselves and the other party involved. If we have too many boundaries, no one can get close to us at all and we end up isolated and alone. With good boundaries, we learn to develop an appropriate sense of roles amongst family members and the other people in our lives. We learn to respect ourselves and others. We can trust and listen not only to ourselves, but to others.

Specifically in parenting, boundaries allow children to feel safe and secure. Boundaries helps children learn self-control and how to function with people outside of their immediate family. Parents who set good boundaries for themselves and for their children are modeling for the children, how, in turn, to set emotional and physical boundaries for themselves. If we can be calm as a child tests out what the boundary and line in the sand actually is, then we are modeling for our child how to handle this in their own lives. We help them learn how to function in the world.

For parents who have trouble setting any boundaries for their children, out of “respect” for the child, I often will ask the parent: Continue reading →

So, I have no research studies on this at all…this is from my own experience and observations in working with families who have had extremely shy and almost fearful children. I am not really talking about children who are more inward; all of us are on the continuum of extrovert to introvert if we look at personality. I am thinking hear of children who are rather socially anxious, fearful a bit… Many of these children whom I have observed were only truly comfortable with their mothers and no one else. Many of these children were first-born children, but not all of them, and many of them were girls, but again, not all of them. This is my special small population sample.

This is how I have personally observed this type of child’s progress into the world outside of his or her mother: Continue reading →

There was a very wise post this morning on the waldorfhomeeducators@yahoogroups.com list by list owner and veteran Waldorf teacher Marsha Johnson. You will the entire post for your reading pleasure below, but I wanted to add a few comments.

I agree and feel the same way as Marsha Johnson: I think community is so important. How homeschoolers get this community may look different from homeschooling family to homeschooling family. Some homeschooling families get this through a place of worship and that is their community that they see numerous times a week. Some get it through a homeschooling group. Some get it through a large extended family with many brothers and sisters and cousins, and some get it though a neighborhood setting. I too, feel sad to hear of homeschooling children who are all alone or older homeschooling children who never have contact with children their own age. It is one thing to say that homeschooled children do wonderful with people of all ages – they typically do, and that is wonderful!- but they also, as they get older need time with other ten year olds and other twelve year olds and as much as they love their brothers and sisters, they will welcome some time to be with children their own age without smaller ones about.

As you plan for fall, please be sure to put in community. Time for you to have community and time for your children to have community. We are not fully human until we can look each other in the eyes and be together. It is so important, and should be an important part of your homeschooling plan: movement, art, the academic pieces, practical work and community. Together, this makes a wonderful homeschooling experience and also eases many of the pangs of the ages of development change.

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Space is the final frontier in parenting the six/seven year old as the child goes through a developmental leap during this time.

Many attached and connected parents do so well in providing their children the gift of time: time to have an unhurried, unrushed childhood. Time to just be: in nature, in the home. Time to rest. Time to grow and time to mature. No hurrying.

But I feel where many attached and connected parents fail is in giving their children the gift of space, especially during this six/seven year change. Space, along with time, are essential gifts to provide to our children to help them grow and become healthy adults. Continue reading →

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I have written before about the really active, can-be-aggressive small child in several back posts of varying nature, but I had a few thoughts I wanted to share today. ( Please be sure to note I am dealing here with fiery temperaments, not especially with children dealing with sensory or developmental issues affecting behavior).

If you are struggling with a six year old who still seems rather “stuck” in immature behavior that involves physicality, I want to encourage you tonight. It doesn’t seem as if people really talk about this at all in parenting resources; it seems it is well- assumed that tantrums or any physical response to a limit is over by age three.

From what I have seen, six year olds can definitely still have a hard time controlling their hands, their emotions, their reactions, their physical responses and such. To those of us involved in Waldorf Education, this seems like of course! Has anyone ever read the book “Ramona The Brave” by Beverly Cleary? Here is a passage about fiery Ramona, six years old and in first grade at school, when she becomes completely angry at a classmate (for those of you who have not read this book it is a paper owl and Susan had copied what Ramona had done to make hers, which is why Ramona is angry in this chapter): Continue reading →

I would love to hear your favorite stories that you tell to six year olds during the six year old Kindergarten year; leave your picks in the comment boxes.

I love those repetitive stories such as The Gingerbread Man, Chicken Licken, etc, but not to reach the heart and soul of the six year old. I truly think that for most six year olds, these tales are enjoyable (just as they are for we the adults!) but I am not certain these will meet the child’s needs if for he or she really is in the throes of real and distinct developmental change. If he or she is changing, really what is needed are stories with a little more “meat”, a little more good versus evil where good wins.

I hear about children who cannot handle fairy tales well; this does happen. I wrote about that here in 2009: http://theparentingpassageway.com/2009/08/16/what-do-i-do-my-child-cant-handle-fairy-tales/ You really CANNOT bring a tale to your child that does not resonate with you or that makes you uncomfortable, so do NOT pick that one. However, you can read a tale for two or three days, and really sleep on it and see what comes to you before you just dismiss it as well. I personally love nearly all the Grimms Tales, and am very comfortable with them, and I think that completely comes out in my storytelling.

So, without further ado, here are some stories we have enjoyed in my family in the past, or I have known families whose children enjoyed these tales; this list has my detailed notes as to each story: Continue reading →

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The Parenting Passageway

Welcome to The Parenting Passageway

A passageway, as one would guess, is a conduit to the next thing: a way to allow movement from one place, condition or stage to the next. This blog is entitled “The Parenting Passageway” as it is intended to help support and encourage parents in peaceful parenting for our hectic world. Thank you for reading and many blessings to you

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